Fallen Apart
by Kperkins
Summary: This starts after 6x22. How is Damon dealing without Elena? Will his love for her keep him strong or tear him apart? Delena. Possibly a one-shot. Please read and review!


**I'm so bad. I fought with whether to upload this or not, but eventually decided to just go ahead and do it. I don't know whether this will be a continuing story or if will stay a one-shot. Honestly, I have about 500 ideas for stories and I want to follow them ALL! But, I do have a few others started already. Those that read Sweet Surrender, I'm working on a new chapter right now. The semester is DONE and I am free (other than watching my cousin's two kids several times a week). Anyway, this contains SPOILERS for those that haven't seen the last episode.**

 **Please, please, please let me know what you guys think!**

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 **Elena's POV**

Everything is fuzzy. I feel… thirsty. I feel… hung over. My head is pounding, my eyes are sticky like they are after you've cried way too much, and my whole body feels like it's fallen asleep. What time is it? What _day_ is it? It must be night because even after blinking several times, my eyes can't seem to focus on anything, darkness just continues pressing in on them.

It's not until I try to roll over that I realize where I am: I'm in a coffin. I've been asleep for God knows how many years… but… that means that Bonnie... Bonnie is gone.

Conflicting emotions course through me: happiness because I'm awake, despair because it's likely that most of my friends and my brother are now gone, and overwhelming anticipation because I know that somewhere out there is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, the person who changed my entire world: Damon.

He's out there.

I take a deep breath and sigh. I have no idea what to expect. Right outside this coffin is a world that's probably much different than what I knew and I suddenly have a new respect for Lily. Coming from a world trapped in 1903 to 2014 had to have been difficult, but I never really knew _how_ difficult until this moment… and I haven't even stepped outside, yet.

But I have to. What's the saying? A journey of thousand miles begins with a single step.

I guess this is my first step.

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 **Damon's POV**

 **20 years earlier**

Elena wouldn't have wanted this. This isn't what she meant when she said she wanted me to be happy. But then, she isn't here, is she?

But Amanda is. At least, I think that's what her name is. She's begging me to spare her life, but what's the point? It will end one day no matter what I do. Maybe next week, maybe 10 years from now or 30. Who cares? All I'm doing is helping to speed up the process a little.

I lean down, listening to the pounding of her heart, the swish of blood in her arteries… I can even feel her pulse bounding against my fingertips. I whisper to her, telling her to calm down, it will all be over soon, and her heart rate picks up, tempting me. I stroke her hair back which is soaked with tears and turn her head to the side before sinking my teeth into her neck.

She cries out, but who is going to hear her? Who is going save her?

The warmth of her blood runs through me and, though it doesn't quell the pain completely, it helps me to forget, for a time, all the reasons I have to hurt. The truth is that all the blood in the world can't fill the hole I have in me. It can't heal me, not really, but it makes me stronger, more able to bear the pain. Or at least more able to ignore it.

God, this is it. This is as close to happy as I can feel. This is a close to normal as it gets for me.

The girl's body starts to go slack, her already weak attempt to fend me off getting weaker, and I can hear her heartbeat speeding up, trying to compensate for the lack of blood circulating through her veins. But it's too little, too late.

How fitting.

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Can I just say how ironic it is that I spent the first 145 years of my vampire life waiting for Katherine, who I believed was imprisoned, and _now_ , after falling for Elena, she's also imprisoned? Only this time, she's imprisoned inside her body.

I tried for a while to do what I knew she'd want… to not return to the person I was before we met all those years ago. I don't know how long I was able to do right by her, but it wasn't enough. Then, again, I always knew that. I was never enough.

After a few years, I convinced myself that I would be okay as long as I could just see her again. Just once. I just wanted to hold her hand, to sit and talk with her in her subconscious like I did before I left her there. I just wanted to know that she is okay. But Bonnie wouldn't let me in. She refused to open the damn door and, even though part of me knew that she was right, I was pissed at her in a way you can only be pissed at your best friend.

She's somewhere outside Mystic Falls, now, and I don't see her much even though she calls often. She's afraid I'm going to go off the deep end. She doesn't know I already have. Stefan and Caroline started their journey across the world, trying to put some distance between them and everything they used to love. Tyler left to go be a wolf somewhere that's NOT HERE and I'm definitely not complaining about that. Donovan is a police officer, a futile profession, so it's perfectly suited for him. And Ric has returned to the alcoholic he was after Jenna's death, only this time he no longer has a job or any hope for the future. I tried to be a good friend to him. We both lost the same thing: the future we'd always wanted. But it's too hard to look at him and see myself. All it does it remind me of the vision Stefan gave me in that God-awful suburban nightmare, showing me what my life would be like as a human without Elena. It almost broke me… and, then, in some cruel twist of fate, we end up here.

I know. You're supposed to lean on the people that care about you and blah, blah, blah, but I'm not much for crying on shoulders and, besides, all the people that try to comfort me only remind me of what I lost. To be honest, I'm glad I don't see them. I'm glad most of them left. I'm tired of hearing that I need to live my life, that I need to be strong, that I need to think of Elena. All I do is think of Elena. I don't need to be reminded to do that.

So, I roam what's left of Mystic Falls and pick off the survivors to maintain a constant state of "blood high". You would think that with that, plus the ridiculous amount of alcohol I drink, I would be able to at least lose time some, but I don't. I remember every single second, like someone put the world on half-speed, like whoever runs this Godforsaken Earth is having a good laugh at my expense, watching me writhing like an ant under the Sun and a magnifying glass.

I discard the body of the girl in the street. No one but Donovan is around to get onto me for littering and I don't care anyway. If he tries to pick a fight, I'll just kill him and tell Elena he died in the line of duty. Technically, that wouldn't be a lie.

As if on cue, my phone rings. It's Bonnie. I hit ignore and walk to my car, wiping the blood from the corner of my mouth. How much longer can I do this? How much longer can I hold onto my humanity? The only thing keeping me from turning it off completely is the girl lying in a casket on the other side of town. It's not that I don't think I would immediately turn it back on if I saw her… I know that I would. I just don't know if she would be able to, _again,_ look over the heinous crimes I would definitely commit. I don't know that she would be able to forgive me for not being strong enough. Even the pain of living without her now is less than the fear of losing her when she's standing in front of me.

I hear footsteps behind me as I reach for my door handle, but it's too late. There's a sting in my neck and a familiar burning as vervain seeps into the tissue. Before I hit the ground, I look up into the determined green eyes of Bonnie Bennett.

"You bitch." I say with as much hatred as I can muster.

And then everything goes black.

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 **Please read and review!**


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